E01584ccdcdf0e8ecf_30m6bvuuu

We are pleased to announce that my friend and colleague Benjamin Jealous, President and CEO of the NAACP, is confirmed to speak at the HOPE Global Financial Dignity Summit scheduled for November 14th-15th, 2012, in Atlanta, Georgia.  Mr. Jealous will also serve as Co-Chair for a Working Group at the Global Summit, and speak at the Global Dignity Forum on the 14th.

Read more on Benjamin Jealous below.

Benjamin Todd Jealous is the 17th President and CEO of the NAACP.  Appointed at age 35 in 2008, he is the youngest person to lead the century old organization.  During his tenure, the NAACP's online activists have swelled from 175,000 to more than 600,000; its donors have increased from 16,000 individuals per year to more than 120,000; and its membership has increased three years in a row for the first time in more than 20 years.

Jealous began his career as a community organizer in Harlem in 1991 with the NAACP Legal Defense Fund while working his way through college.  In 1993, after being suspended for organizing student protests at Columbia University, he went to work as an investigative reporter for Mississippi's frequently-firebombed Jackson Advocate newspaper.

Over past two decades, he has helped organize successful campaigns to abolish the death penalty for children, stop Mississippi's governor from turning a public historically black university into a prison, and pass federal legislation against prison rape. His journalistic investigations have been credited with helping save the life of a white inmate who was being threatened for helping convict corrupt prison guards, free a black small farmer who was being framed for arson, and spur official investigations into law enforcement corruption.

A Rhodes Scholar, he is a graduate of Columbia and Oxford University, the past president of the Rosenberg Foundation and served as the founding director of Amnesty International's US Human Rights Program.  While at Amnesty, he authored the widely-cited report: Threat and Humiliation–Racial Profiling, Domestic Security, and Human Rights in the United States.  

As President of the NAACP, he has opened national programs on education, health, and environmental justice. He has also greatly increased the organization's capacity to work on issues related to the economy and register and mobilize voters.

A fifth-generation member of the NAACP, Jealous comes from a long-line of American freedom fighters.  His mother, who descends from two black Reconstruction statesmen, desegregated Baltimore's Western High School for Girls in 1954 as a member of the NAACP's Youth and College Division.  His father, who descends from a Revolutionary War soldier who fought at the Battle of Bunker Hill and Sufragettes, was one of a small number of white men jailed during the Congress of Racial Equality's efforts to desegregate Baltimore's downtown business district.  He is married to Lia Epperson Jealous, a civil rights lawyer and professor of constitutional law. They have two children and live in Silver Spring, MD.

Link to the NAACP here.

 

John Hope Bryant is a thought leader, founder, chairman and CEO of Operation HOPE and Bryant Group Companies, Inc. Magazine/CEO READ bestselling business author of LOVE LEADERSHIP: The New Way to Lead in a Fear-Based World (Jossey-Bass), the only African-American bestselling business author in America, and is chairman of the Subcommittee for the Under-Served and Community Empowerment for the U.S. President’s Advisory Council on Financial Capability, for President Barack Obama.  Mr. Bryant is the co-founder of the Gallup-HOPE Index, the only national research poll on youth financial dignity and youth economic energy in the U.S. He is also a co-founder of Global Dignity with HRH Crown Prince Haakon of Norway and Professor Pekka Himanen of Finland. Global Dignity is affiliated with the Forum of Young Global Leaders and the World Economic Forum.   Mr. Bryant serves on the board of directors of Ares Commercial Real Estate Corporation, an NYSE Euronext publicly traded company, and a division of $54 billion Ares Capital. 

Pin It on Pinterest